Jul 14, 2025 19:00:00

A collection of MacPaint art from the mid-1980s that is still fascinating today

MacPaint was a painting software that came standard with the Macintosh released by Apple in 1984, and was an innovative software that showed the prototype of a graphical user interface (GUI) such as mouse operation, tool palette, copy & paste, and zoom editing. Anthony, a blogger who has experience in founding Apple's user community, has summarized 'MacPaint art' created within the limited expression that can only display one bit per pixel, that is, two colors, black or white.

decryption's blog - MacPaint Art From The Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today
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The Berkeley Macintosh Users Group (BMUG) was a large community of Mac users active at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1980s, providing information about early Macs, free software, and technical support. In the 1980s and 1990s, BMUG published CD-ROMs packed with software and images, including many artworks created with MacPaint, an early paint program.

While Anthony was browsing the BMUG CD-ROMs to get information about the Macintosh of the time, he noticed the greatness of MacPaint art, and checked out 18,000 pieces of MacPaint art thoroughly using DiscMaster , which allows instant access to valuable file archives from the 1980s to the 2000s. MacPaint images cannot be opened directly on current operating systems, but they can be viewed with thumbnails on DiscMaster.

The image below is a MacPaint art piece that depicts symbols of Macintosh culture and the software industry from the 1980s to the 1990s, based on the world as seen by ACIUS, the company that developed 4th Dimension, a database management system and integrated development environment for Macintosh developed in the 1980s.

Porsche 911 Carrera drawn in MacPaint. MacPaint only supports black and white and does not even have grayscale, so it creates shadows, glossiness, and a three-dimensional effect.

A dark back alley.

A row of skyscrapers.

Landscape painting.

The various brightnesses and darknesses of the satellite flying through space are beautifully captured with MacPaint's limited resources.

Anthony also picked up a few other pieces of art that give a sense of the future, such as the one below, which shows robots cooking, serving, and selecting food.

The artwork is based on Salvador Dali's famous '

The Persistence of Memory ,' with an old Macintosh placed in the center. The signature Louis Markoya in the lower right is a real artist known for being Dali's assistant, and may have been alive in the 1980s, but there is no record of him leaving any 1-bit art, so it is probably not his signature but a parody of Dali's paintings. It is said that there were many jokes in the MacPaint community where people would sign their works using the names of famous people or put fictitious names on their works.

The first Macintosh set, equipped with an early-model keyboard and a small one-button mouse.

In addition, realistic portraits are also drawn using MacPaint.

Realistic human hand. The artist in this painting, signed Gerry Phibbs, was a MacPaint artist active in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Some of the MacPaint art is signed by the artist. Anthony said, 'It would be interesting to track down MacPaint artists and see what they've been up to lately. I'd like to see what kind of achievements they've made as artists since they created such amazing works with 1-bit expression on a 9-inch screen 40 years ago.'

Anthony's blog and MacPaint art have also been a hot topic on the social site Hacker News, with some people saying, 'Constraints are what shape art, and even what art is. Manipulating constraints to achieve the seemingly impossible is a legitimate part of art,' and others saying that great art can be created precisely because of the limited world of one bit. Others said, 'It's interesting to think about the intersection of culture, technology, and aesthetics. Games often incorporate historical aesthetics, like painting, but not movies.' Discussions were held about the merits of pixel art and the relationship between technology and art.